Ars takes a look at KDE 4.0.2. "When KDE 4.0 was officially released in January, there were a lot of gaping holes in basic functionality. During the past few months, the codebase has matured considerably, and the environment is steadily approaching the point where it will be sufficiently robust for widespread day-to-day use. Although there are still many features missing, version 4.0.2 - which was released last week - offers an improved user experience. We tested KDE 4.0.2 with the recently released Kubuntu 8.04 alpha 6." In addition, there is a new 'visual changelog' for KDE 4.1.

You posted your own specially selected excerpts about a Gnome 2.0 pre-release and compared it to what is now the 2nd update to the final release release of KDE4, taking up a lot of screen real estate to say nothing of significance. The post probably deserved to be modded down.

You are being ridiculously thick about this. I suppose you haven't been around long enough to remember the 2.0 release (if you were then you must have a very poor memory).
That was around the time Nautilus was heralded as a revolution and turned out to be incredibly slow, bloated, and unstable. When most features from 1.4 disappeared into thin air, and new frameworks like bonobo were introduced which really never caught on.
And yet nautilus eventually turned into a good file manager, and features were re-added with time, and useless frameworks were deprecated.

So your memory of Gnome 2.0 being particularly good is nothing but revisionist history. But it was still a good step to take in the end. Same with KDE 4.0.